The Internet, also referred to as the worldwide web (WWW), has become an enormous source for multimedia content. Such multimedia content is intended for display on a user device such as a personal computer (PC), a smart phone, and the like. The content may be searched by a user of the user device and can be displayed in response to search queries received from the user.
The use of search engines for multimedia content search is discussed in the related art. The search engines can search for specific content and provide recommendations of content that is similar to what has been requested by the user. Search engines typically index data items of the dataset (e.g., web pages, images, email messages, documents, etc.) and then try to match an input query to the indexed data items.
As an example, a conventional search engine technique for searching for images includes the analysis of an input image (query) to create a mathematical model based on shapes, lines, proportions, and colors of the query. The created model is matched against images already in indexed dataset. As part of the process of identifying the image and returning similar results, the engine also analyzes the text of a web page that the matching image is found in order to determine what the image is. However, the search for images is limited to images or similar contents displayed in websites. In addition, search engine techniques are limited to images, and only indexed images and web pages can be searched. Moreover, the returned similar results or recommendations provided by the search engines are not optimized based on the user preferences. Rather, the results or recommendations are only related to webpages that they appear in.
It would therefore be advantageous to provide a solution that would overcome the deficiencies of the prior art by optimizing the performance of the system while providing content to a user device.